Living in the grey area.

Yesterday, out of nowhere, I ended up chatting with a girl from my ethnic studies class for an hour. We’d never met or spoken before, but something clicked and we both opened up and talked about everything from our our fears of graduating, and the racism and sexism still prevalent in society, to how awesome Star Wars is. One idea we agreed on was that life is hard to handle because everything is so complex - one can’t hold hard and fast opinions because the more you look into it, the more complicated the issue becomes - everything is the “grey area.” 

That idea (and the conversation and experience of connecting with her in general) really struck home with me. I realize that I want to have things be quickly categorizable and easy to deal with - good/bad, heroes/villains, black/white. The problem is, nothing is like that. Everything is complicated. And seeing everything as simple is, in the end, dangerous, because it leads to ignorance and stereotyping and a failure to see and/or understand everything in the world around us.

But at the same time, it’s dangerous to try to delve ridiculously deep into everything. One has to choose which issues are worth taking on, and which have to be passed by. Life is short, one has to find the important quickly and act on it. As she (Amanda) put it, you have to find the trees and not just see the forest. It’s a clichéd metaphor, I know, but when she said it, it just made sense. 

I struggle between the hard and fast divisions versus examining everything a lot lately. I want to find an obvious identity to put myself in, but I’m not 100% anything - I’m not black and everything else is white. Not having my own obvious identity makes it hard for me to find my “trees” so to speak. What do I want to focus on? What is worth delving into? I still don’t know.

It seems, as such, that this time of life is my “grey area.” I’m not a kid, I’m not an adult, I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m not dependent, I’m not independent, I’m wandering between the two. And perhaps I don’t need to define every aspect of my identity - maybe the grey area is where I should inhabit. I’ll find the trees to come out of the forest for, and take it from there.